Evolutionary Timelines Help Explain the Evolution of Parental Care Strategies

Comparative research on the evolution of parental care has followed a general trend in recent years, with researchers gathering data on clutch size or egg size and correlating these traits with ecological variables across a phylogeny. The goal of these studies is to shed light on how and why certain strategies evolve. However, results vary across studies, and we rarely have results explaining why the observed pattern occurred, leaving us with further hypotheses to test. By using a combination of comparative methods, we provide an explanation of how such patterns emerge based on the evolutionary timeline of constructing burrows and the energy invested into egg size and egg number; this combination also allowed us to pinpoint why the pattern occurred. We do so with data on freshwater crayfish, which are ideal for such investigations because they vary in their reliance on burrows, their body size, and their investment into their offspring. Specifically, we tested whether a strong dependence on burrows is related to investment in eggs (i.e., larger eggs or more eggs) given the body size of the species. Surprisingly, we found no correlation between burrowing and the size or number of eggs crayfish lay; instead, body size was the best predictor of the number of eggs (but not the size of eggs) that each species lays. Interestingly, our analyses suggest that crayfish ancestors had a small clutch size, relatively large eggs, and a weak connection to burrows. Thus, the shift to heavily relying on burrows appeared after this lineage was already investing in large eggs, which gives insights into the colonization of freshwater by an ancestral astacidean ancestor. Although other studies show that the evolution of parental care strategies is not straightforward, our study provides a clear evolutionary timeline of the interplay between the evolution of burrowing behavior and shifts in the evolution of egg investment. Furthermore, our work showcases how merging multiple phylogenetically informed approaches can disentangle the origin and evolution of life history traits.